News Media, Target of Trump’s Declaration of War, Expresses Alarm - New York Times

News Media, Target of Trump’s Declaration of War, Expresses Alarm

For wary Washington journalists, it seemed only a matter of time before Donald J. Trump’s presidency would lead to a high-tension standoff between his administration and the news media.

But on Day 1?

The news media world found itself in a state of shock on Sunday, a day after Mr. Trump declared himself in “a running war with the media” and the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, used his first appearance on the White House podium to deliver a fiery jeremiad against the press.

Worse, many journalists said, were the falsehoods that sprang from the lips of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer on Saturday. Mr. Trump accused the news media of confecting a battle between himself and the intelligence services (in fact, he had previously compared the services to Nazi Germany in a Twitter post). And among other easily debunked assertions, Mr. Spicer falsely claimed that Mr. Trump’s inauguration was the most attended in history (photographs indicated it was not).

“It was absolutely surprising and stunning,” the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Jeff Mason, said on CNN on Sunday.

In a phone interview later, Mr. Mason said: “People were surprised. I was surprised. It’s not what I was expecting for the first statement by the press secretary in the press room.”

The tensions flared anew on Sunday when Kellyanne Conway, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, said in a television interview that Mr. Spicer had merely presented “alternative facts” about the inauguration, prompting an astonished response from her questioner, Chuck Todd of NBC.

“Wait a minute — ‘alternative facts’?” Mr. Todd asked Ms. Conway on “Meet the Press.” “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

When Mr. Todd pressed her about why the administration had put Mr. Spicer behind the lectern for the first time to “utter a provable falsehood,” Ms. Conway responded with a sharp threat. “If we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here,” she said.

Video of Ms. Conway’s evasion quickly spread on social media. The phrases “alternative facts” and “#alternativefacts” had been used on Twitter more than 380,000 times by midafternoon on Sunday, a Twitter spokesman said.

Also by Sunday afternoon, there were scattered calls for the White House press corps to boycott Mr. Spicer’s briefings, although such a drastic response appeared unlikely.

Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, said on Sunday that the briefings were “a useful, if not essential, tradition” and that his outlet would keep a reporter there. Mr. Smith added that the Trump administration would “find practical reasons to be honest.”

“In particular,” Mr. Smith wrote in an email, “I think they’ll find in moments of real crisis, rather than political theater, that they need to win back the credibility that they are spending now.”

Mr. Mason, the correspondents’ association president, who is the chief liaison between the White House press corps and Mr. Spicer, said his goal was to maintain a constructive relationship.

“It’s up to him and up to the president to decide how they want to get started,” Mr. Mason said of Mr. Spicer. “And that’s what they decided.”

Some reporters and commentators noted that hostility between White House press operations and the news media was nothing new.

Jack Shafer, the acerbic media critic, wrote on Twitter that “the press is supposed to be abused, disparaged, defamed, dissed.” He added, “It’s part of the job.”

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Lynn Sweet, a political reporter for The Chicago Sun-Times, said credibility, not civility, was what mattered.

“If Sean wants to have an angry tone, frankly, I don’t care,” Ms. Sweet said on CNN. “I don’t care if you vent.”

She added: “I care if he says something that’s true. I care if he gives us facts.”

In an interview on Sunday, Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary under George W. Bush, said that Mr. Spicer’s statements on Saturday were somewhat typical of the spin at press briefings.

But Mr. Spicer’s “eagerness and willingness” to confront the press corps so directly represented a break from tradition, Mr. Fleischer said. “Everybody complains about the press, but most people bite their tongue” in news conferences, Mr. Fleischer said.

Mr. Fleischer added that Mr. Spicer’s remarks could hurt his credibility unless he backed them up — or at least addressed them — during the first official White House briefing on Monday.

“Sean’s first client is the president of the United States and those around the president; his second client is the press corps,” Mr. Fleischer said. “And he has to serve both, always guided by the truth.”

In reporting on the day’s events, many news organizations also called out the falsehoods that Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer offered on Saturday, using variations of “false,” “falsehoods” and “lies” in headlines and stories. Breitbart News, the right-wing website that has embraced Mr. Trump, was more credulous in its headline: “WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer Blasts Media’s ‘Deliberately False Reporting.’”

Voice of America, the government-funded news operation that broadcasts American journalism beyond the country’s borders, pointed out Mr. Spicer’s inaccuracies and ran an article from The Associated Press fact-checking his remarks.

Still, that came only after the organization initially posted a string of Twitter messages that quoted Mr. Spicer without context, prompting questions about whether it was endorsing his comments. Voice of America’s director, Amanda Bennett, said that there had been no instructions or interference from the Trump administration and that Voice of America had quickly decided it needed to provide more explanation.

“Internally, there was like an explosion of direct messages saying you’ve got to do something about this,” Ms. Bennett said in an interview on Sunday.

That led to a course correction on Twitter, including the deletion of one tweet that appeared to support Mr. Spicer.

For First Amendment advocates, the events of Mr. Trump’s first 48 hours in office were, to say the least, unsettling.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union denounced Mr. Spicer’s remarks as “possible government censorship” and vowed that any threats by Mr. Trump’s administration to the principles of freedom of the press would be met with a “vigorous defense” of the First Amendment.

“If Trump wants to take on the First Amendment,” the group said in the statement, “we will see him in court.”

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting from Washington and Mike Isaac from San Francisco.

White House Pushes ‘Alternative Facts.’ Here Are the Real Ones - New York Times

By NICHOLAS FANDOS

JANUARY 22, 2017

WASHINGTON — Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the White House had put forth “alternative facts” to ones reported by the news media about the size of Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd.

She made this assertion — which quickly went viral on social media — a day after Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had accused the news media of reporting falsehoods about the inauguration and Mr. Trump’s relationship with the intelligence agencies.

In leveling this attack, the president and Mr. Spicer made a series of false statements.

Here are the facts.

In a speech at the C.I.A. on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the news media had constructed a feud between him and the intelligence community. “They sort of made it sound like I had a ‘feud’ with the intelligence community,” he said. “It is exactly the opposite, and they understand that, too.”

In fact, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the intelligence agencies during his transition to office and has questioned their conclusion that Russia meddled in the election to aid his candidacy. He called their assessment “ridiculous” and suggested that it had been politically motivated.

After the disclosure of a dossier with unsubstantiated claims about him, Mr. Trump alleged that the intelligence agencies had allowed a leak of the material. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he asked in a post on Twitter.

Mr. Trump said of his inauguration crowd, “It looked honestly like a million and a half people, whatever it was, it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

Aerial photographs clearly show that the crowd did not stretch to the Washington Monument. An analysis by The New York Times, comparing photographs from Friday to ones taken of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, showed that Mr. Trump’s crowd was significantly smaller and less than the 1.5 million people he claimed. An expert hired by The Times found that Mr. Trump’s crowd on the National Mall was about a third of the size of Mr. Obama’s in 2009.

Mr. Trump said that though he had been “hit by a couple of drops” of rain as he began his address on Inauguration Day, the sky soon cleared. “And the truth is, it stopped immediately, and then became sunny,” he said. “And I walked off, and it poured after I left. It poured.”

The truth is that it began to rain lightly almost exactly as Mr. Trump began to speak and continued to do so throughout his remarks, which lasted about 18 minutes, and after he finished.

Speaking later on Saturday in the White House briefing room, Mr. Spicer amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” he said.

There is no evidence to support this claim. Not only was Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd far smaller than Mr. Obama’s in 2009, but he also drew fewer television viewers in the United States (30.6 million) than Mr. Obama did in 2009 (38 million) and Ronald Reagandid in 1981 (42 million), Nielsen reported. Figures for online viewership were not available.

Mr. Spicer said that Washington’s Metro system had greater ridership on Friday than it did for Mr. Obama’s 2013 inauguration. “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural,” Mr. Spicer said.

Neither number is correct, according to the transit system, which reported570,557 entries into the rail system on Friday, compared with 782,000 on Inauguration Day in 2013.

Mr. Spicer said that “this was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.”

In fact, similar coverings were used during the 2013 inauguration to protect the grass. The coverings did not hamper analyses of the crowd size.

Mr. Spicer said that it was “the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”

The Secret Service said security measures were largely unchanged this year. There were also few reports of long lines or delays.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

Trump's son-in-law cleared by justice department for senior advisor - CNN

Washington (CNN)The Justice Department concluded Friday that Jared Kushner serving in his father-in-law's administration would not be a violation of federal anti-nepotism laws.
"In choosing his personal staff, the President enjoys an unusual degree of freedom, which Congress found suitable to the demands of his office," wrote Daniel Koffsky, deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel, which serves as interpreter of federal law for the White House.
In essence, Koffsky reasoned that the anti-nepotism law covers only appointments in an "executive" agency and that the White House Office is not an executive agency within the law. He cited a separate law that gives the President broad powers to hire his staff.
That law authorizes the president to appoint "employees in the White House office without regard to any other provision of law regulating the employment or compensation of persons in the government service."
The argument is in line with the interpretation put forward by Kushner's attorney, Jamie S. Gorelick, earlier in the week.
"The appointment of Jared Kushner, President-elect Donald Trump's son-in-law, as a White House senior adviser is clearly lawful under this authority," Gorelick wrote in The New York Times earlier this week.
A person familiar with the issue told CNN that Trump's transition team asked career lawyers with the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel to review the proposed Kushner appointment.
Another source familiar with the matter said Koffsky is a longtime career attorney at OLC. The person familiar with the issue said political appointees of the DOJ, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, did not play any role in the opinion.
A transition source told CNN earlier this month that Kushner, who is married to the President's daughter Ivanka, will be senior adviser to the president.
Kushner, a 36-year-old Harvard-educated businessman, was a key political strategist on Trump's election. But federal anti-nepotism laws brought into question whether he could continue his influence in the President's life post-election.
Trump -- along with many of his Cabinet nominees -- has repeatedly been criticized for conflict of interest. But the Justice Department downplayed those concerns in this specific hire.
"A President wanting a relative's advice on governmental matters therefore has a choice: to seek that advice on an unofficial, ad hoc basis without conferring the status and imposing the responsibilities that accompany formal White House positions; or to appoint his relative to the White House under title 3 and subject him to substantial restrictions against conflicts of interest," Koffsky wrote.
"We believe that the President's special hiring authority in 3 U.S.C. § 105(a) permits him to make appointments to the White House Office that the anti-nepotism statute might otherwise forbid," Koffsky wrote.
He acknowledged that while his conclusion "departs" from "prior work" of the Office of Legal Counsel, "this departure is fully justified."
In a statement, Gorelick said, "We believed that we had the better argument on this. The Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department -- in an opinion by a highly regarded career Deputy Assistant Attorney General -- adopted a position consistent with our own."
CNN

Donald Trump Will Take An Oath To Defend A Constitution He May Not Even Understand - Huffington Post

NEW YORK ― Donald Trump won the White House on promises: Deporting millions. Banning and surveilling Muslims. Bringing back waterboarding. Making it easier to sue the press. Imprisoning your political adversaries.

If implemented, there’s little doubt that every one of these proposals and policies would crash head-on with the Constitution.

And yet around noon on Friday, as the same founding document mandates, President-elect Donald Trump is set to become President Donald Trump — by sheer virtue of a promise he’s never made before: a solemn oath to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.

With Chief Justice John Roberts and the world as witnesses, Trump will be vowing to stand up not for his interests, his ego, his Twitter account. But rather for a document that he’s likely never read, let alone had the time or interest to reflect on how its guarantees of equality, due process of law and many freedoms put a check on government and the power of the president.

Can the public even hold to his word a president for whom truth appears to carry almost no weight?

“What does it mean to have a bullshit artist as President of the United States — a leader both responsible for and constrained by the rule of law?” pondered a post-election essay by Quinta Jurecic, a writer at the Brookings Institution who has studied political theory.

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

As president, Donald Trump will meet the Constitution head-on.

It’s a question that boggles the mind and for which Americans have no answer, in part because Americans have never handed their highest office to a businessman with no experience in public service and such little regard toward the rule of law, the judges who look after it and a system of government that depends as much on written laws as on unwritten norms that keep it together.

If President Barack Obama, a mindful student of the Constitution and the courts, thought it prudent to ask his Office of Legal Counsel for guidance on whether the Emoluments Clause barred his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office, Trump has shown no such prudence.

“The law’s totally on my side ― meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” Trump has said, dismissing warnings from a government ethics watchdog and experts with experience under Republican and Democratic presidents who have charged that his business entanglements will find him in violation of his oath from the very moment he takes it.

It is possible, as UCLA law professor Richard Re has written, for a public official to feelthe moral weight of his oath and his office as soon as he takes on its powers and responsibilities. And in that sense, Trump could very well become a different man as the burdens of the job become more real to him.

“I think that no one who takes an oath to the Constitution is fully aware of all the complexities of law,” Re told The Huffington Post back in November. “Part of what the oath means is making an effort to understand what the Constitution requires as events unfold.”

Campaign promises can be broken, and for that a politician may pay a political price. But a presidential oath is wholly independent of those promises, carrying its own set of obligations. Under its terms, Trump can only be held to his promise to “faithfully” execute his office and to safeguard the Constitution.

In the final case of the Obama administration before the Supreme Court earlier this week — a dispute over Bush-era civil rights abuses, no less — Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to put these duties in perspective, and portend the courts’ role in the coming years.

“There’s no blank check, even for the president. And if there’s no blank check, that means sometimes they can go too far. And if they have gone too far, it is our job to say that,” he said in open court.

Because Trump is such an unprecedented figure in American history, that admonition really extends to everyone — the public, Congress, the courts — regardless of political persuasion. As he takes the oath Friday, the Constitution itself may depend on it.

“As citizens of a country that purports to live under the rule of law, we have a duty to insist that words have meaning,” Jurecic wrote in her essay, “even when the President swears an oath he doesn’t even understand.”

Trump promises insurance for everyone after removing Obamacare - Reuters

replace Obamacare with a plan that would envisage "insurance for everybody," he said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Sunday night.

Trump did not give the newspaper specifics about his proposals to replace Democratic President Barack Obama's signature health insurance law, but said the plan was nearly finished and he was ready to unveil it alongside the leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress. The Republican president-elect takes office on Friday.

"It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon," Trump told the Post, adding he was waiting for his nominee for health and human services secretary, Tom Price, to be confirmed.

The plan, he said, would include "lower numbers, much lower deductibles," without elaborating.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”

Trump was also quoted as saying in the interview that he would target pharmaceutical companies over drug pricing and insist they negotiate directly with the Medicare and Medicaid government health plans for the elderly and poor.

U.S. House Republicans won passage on Friday of a measure starting the process of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, despite concerns about not having a ready replacement and the potential financial cost of repealing the law.

With the vote, Republicans began delivering on their promise to end Obamacare, also a campaign pledge of Trump, who has called the program a "disaster."

The law, which expanded health coverage to some 20 million people, has been plagued by increases in insurance premiums and deductibles and by some large insurers leaving the system.

ALSO IN POLITICS

• Trump, now president, pledges to put 'America First' in nationalist speech
• Violence flares in Washington during Trump inauguration

Republicans have called Obamacare federal government overreach and have sought to undermine it in Congress and the courts since it was passed by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in 2010.

Democrats say Obamacare has allowed growing numbers of Americans to get medical insurance and helped slow the rise in healthcare spending.

(Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Will Dunham and Peter Cooney)

Reuters

Samsung Heir Lee Jae-yong Escapes Arrest in Massive Bribery Scandal - TIME Business

Samsung Heir Lee Jae-yong Escapes Arrest in Massive Bribery Scandal

Posted: 19 Jan 2017 01:04 AM PST

(SEOUL)— A Seoul court on Thursday denied a request to arrest one of South Korea’s most powerful men, the heir to the Samsung Electronics juggernaut, in a setback to prosecutors investigating an influence-peddling scandal that toppled South Korea’s president.
The Seoul Central District Court said that a judge concluded that there was not enough justification to detain the 48-year-old billionaire Samsung vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, at this stage.
The announcement, made around 5 a.m. local time, allowed Lee to return home after a long night. He had been waiting for the court’s decision at a detention center south of Seoul for more than 12 hours after a court hearing the previous day.

Samsung said “the merits of this case can now be determined without the need for detention.”
The decision means that Samsung avoids what could have been a stunning fall for the princeling of the country’s richest family, a man groomed to lead South Korea’s most successful company.
It came amid calls for caution from some business groups and newspapers worried that arresting Lee could hurt the economy because of Samsung’s huge role, both economically and psychologically, in the country.
It is not uncommon in South Korea for courts to issue an arrest warrant past midnight for important or contentious cases, said Shin Jae-hwan, a spokesman for the Seoul court. The long deliberation means the judge must have agonized over the decision, he added.
Prosecutors said Lee gave 43 billion won ($36 million) in bribes to President Park Geun-hye and Choi Soon-sil, her confidante, seeking support for a contentious merger. They also suspect him of embezzling and lying under oath during a parliamentary hearing last month.
The court’s decision may hurt prosecutors’ plan to expand the bribery probe to Park.
Prosecutors expressed strong disappointment and said they believe the court’s decision was caused by a difference in legal views on the nature of the allegations against the Samsung heir.
Samsung and other companies told investigators that they felt forced to make donations to foundations controlled by Choi in fear of retaliatory tax investigations and other unfair government treatment, according to state prosecutors who handed over the investigation to special prosecutors.
“The court’s rejection of the arrest warrant is very regrettable,” Lee Kyu-chul, a spokesman for a special prosecutors’ team investigating the political scandal, said. “We’ll take measures to continue an investigation unwaveringly,” he said, without elaborating.
South Korea’s main opposition party, which spearheaded Park’s impeachment, accused the court of being too lenient. “The president was impeached and Choi Soon-sil was arrested … but Samsung is still fine,” the Democratic Party said in a statement.
Lee has been serving as the de facto head of Samsung since his father suffered a heart attack in 2014. Shortly after the recalls of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone last year, he joined the board of Samsung Electronics, the group’s crown jewel.
Conglomerates like Samsung, known as chaebol, dominate South Korea’s economy, jobs and investment. Samsung Electronics and its affiliated companies account for about a third of the market value in South Korea’s main stock market.
Civic groups had called for Lee’s arrest as a way to show that all are equal before the law.
Many were infuriated by the allegations that the government had pressured a pension fund, a major investor in Samsung, to help the Lee family’s succession plan. Moon Hyung-pyo, the former health minister was indicted on Monday for allegedly pressuring pension fund officials to support the merger.
Prosecutors said Moon, who now heads the pension fund, acted on behalf of President Park, who ordered him to make sure that the Samsung merger went smoothly. They plan to summon Park to question her about the bribery allegations.
Park has been suspended from her duties since the parliament impeached her in December. She is awaiting the Constitutional Court’s decision on whether her impeachment will be upheld. Choi is on trial for meddling in state affairs.
Educated in South Korea, Japan and the United States, Lee is the crown prince of the country’s richest family, one South Koreans often liken to royalty.
His father is South Korea’s richest individual whose net worth is estimated at $14.8 billion by Forbes Magazine. The younger Lee’s net worth is estimated at $5.8 billion.
The elder Lee was convicted twice on bribery, embezzlement and other charges in 1996 and 2008, but he was never imprisoned. He received suspended jail terms and was later pardoned by the country’s presidents both times.

Why you should not watch Trump's inauguration on TV - TIME

January 20, 2017, will be a pivotal day in American history. Donald J. Trump, the people’s billionaire, will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I do not expect the heavens to cry out or the four horsemen of the apocalypse to appear as he raises his right hand. Elections are what they are, and they often leave us with bad outcomes and questionable people. But I do believe his inauguration will signal a dramatic and dark shift in the direction of the country.
That’s about as nice as I can put it. My mother, who lives on the coast of Mississippi and doesn’t talk politics often, says it more baldly: “the country is going straight to hell.”
Trump will enter office with the lowest approval rating in four decades. In The Wall Street Journal, Janet Hook detailed the unprecedented opposition that awaits him after the inauguration. More than 200,000 women will march in Washington the day after he takes the oath of office. Progressives throughout the country are mobilizing to resist Sywhat they see, with every cabinet nomination and senseless tweet, as a radical attempt to undermine any substantive idea of the public good. Millions of dollars are flowing to grassroots and established organizations to resist Trumpism.
Meanwhile, many are saying, with Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to.” Over 60 members of Congress have declared they will not attend the inauguration. Hollywood and the music industry have all but boycotted the event. Some, like Ashley Judd and Solange, will attend a “Peace Ball” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture the night before Trump puts his hand on the Bible. The aim of the organizers is “to celebrate the accomplishments and successes of the last four years and vow to continue to be the change we want to see in the world” — a thumbing of the nose at Trump.
These are the grand gestures. And I am sure Trump is more than annoyed by the fact that celebrities, high school bands, members of Congress and a host of others have refused to acknowledge and celebrate his ascendance to the highest office of the land. But what can everyday people who reject Trump do on January 20th?
We should blank out: we should refuse to watch the Inauguration on television. Join the likes of Robert Reich and others and boycott Trump’s swearing-in. Engage in some sort of civic activity. Participate in the Facebook telethon and help raise funds for the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Earthjustice. Spend time with the people you love. Disengage from the spectacle. Turn off the television.
In my book, Democracy in Black, I called for a blank-out campaign in the context of revitalizing democratic politics in black communities. I had grown tired of Democrats taking black voters for granted and Republicans exploiting our racial fears. If Democrats refused to address substantively the crisis in black communities, I argued, we should leave the presidential ballot blank and vote down ballot. To my mind — and I still believe this — something dramatic needed to happen. Well, Trump was elected and everything has been turned on its head.
But the hope behind the blank-out campaign still holds. At its heart is the belief that whatever this America is, it isn’t democracy, and that we — those of us who reject the value gap and are genuinely committed to democracy — must dismiss the wrong-headed view that our only choices are the ones right in front of us. We have to dare to imagine our world differently.
Small gestures, like turning off Trump’s Inauguration, are just the beginning. There is so much more that requires us to say, “I would prefer not to.” But lets start small, with the reality star who will be our president and who desperately wants our attention. Given Trump’s attention to polls, his craving for adulation, and his clear and present narcissism I can imagine that, of all the forms of protest on January 20th and afterwards, changing the channel on Inauguration Day might actually register.
Let’s blank out, remembering its broader purpose. Let’s make this the lowest rated Inauguration in televised presidential history. Let’s turn our backs on the world that made him possible and be truly revolutionary.

Why You Shouldn’t Watch Donald Trump’s Inauguration on TV

Time

How do conflict of interest rules apply to Trump ? - Wall Street Journal

By JOE PALAZZOLO and  JACOB GERSHMAN
Jan. 18, 2017 4:48 p.m. ET

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President-elect Donald Trump’s complex web of business holdings in the U.S. and abroad has raised a number of ethical questions without precedent in modern times, due to the breadth of the holdings and his plans to distance himself from them while in office.
What a president can and can’t do, ethically speaking, is a question defying easy answers, but below is a guide to help readers understand the laws and constitutional provisions that constrain the highest office in the land.
Which ethics laws apply to the president?
The president is bound by federal statutes that prohibit bribery and illegal gratuities, or things of value given to officials for the purpose of influencing them. The president is also subject to the federal Stock Act, which bars insider trading by government officials, and a federal anti-nepotism law that bans government officials from appointing relatives to or employing them in agencies controlled by the officials.
He must also file personal financial disclosures that include sources and amounts of income, as well as the approximate value of property held and liabilities owed, among other things.
What parts of the U.S. Constitution are at play here?
Mr. Trump’s business interests could potentially bump into an anticorruption provision of the Constitution known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause, said some legal scholars.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

The framers, according to scholars, wanted to make sure that the country’s diplomatic corps wouldn’t be tainted by even the suspicion of divided loyalty. They had in mind the diamond-encrusted snuff boxes that Louis XVI had bestowed on Benjamin Franklin and other diplomats as retirement gifts.
Over time, the clause faded into obscurity. The Supreme Court has never clarified its scope, leaving the question of how it might apply to the president a matter of speculation.
What exactly does the Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibit?
It is an open question.
The most expansive interpretation of the clause reads it to ban any kind of payment to the president from a foreign government, except with congressional consent. “Even ordinary, fair market value transactions that result in any economic profit or benefit” are covered, said a Brookings Institution analysis from December by former White House ethics lawyers Norman L. Eisen and Richard W. Painter and Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe.
Other scholars said its reach is much narrower. University of Chicago law professor William Baude said he doesn’t think the clause would apply to routine transactions, like a foreign official renting out a Trump hotel room at a fair-market rate.
And a few scholars, notably Maynooth University law lecturer Seth Barrett Tillman, argue that the president isn’t covered by the provision at all. Mr. Tillman said the language of the clause suggests that it extends only to those holding federal appointed or statutory offices, such as cabinet members, but not to the president or vice president.
Mr. Trump’s legal advisers don’t believe the clause stretches as far as the Brookings authors would argue. The “Constitution does not forbid fair-market-value transactions with foreign officials,” said a “white paper” released by the law firm handling Mr. Trump’s conflict-of-interest business restructuring. But his lawyers haven’t disputed the applicability of the clause to the president and vice president.
How would a violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause be enforced?
Many scholars are skeptical that a private party would have standing to bring a lawsuit against Mr. Trump that alleges a foreign emoluments clause violation, as no federal statute expressly creates a private right of action for a violation.
Beyond that obstacle, a plaintiff would have to show that an alleged gift or emolument caused the litigant to suffer harm and that the injury that could be remedied by the court. Clearing those hurdles would likely be difficult, according to legal experts.
Courts might deem Congress the more appropriate branch to be the enforcer, given that the emoluments clause already gives Congress the power of consent to certain gifts.
Congress could launch investigations into any alleged violations of the clause, block a president’s policies and nominees, and, in the most severe cases, open impeachment proceedings, said scholars. Assuming the emoluments clause applies to the president, a knowing violation could be an impeachable offense depending on the circumstances.
President-elect Trump has said on Twitter and elsewhere he can’t have a conflict of interest under federal law. Is he correct?
The president, vice president and members of Congress are exempt from a law that prohibits federal officials from participating in government matters in which they have a financial interest, said Kathleen Clark, an ethics expert and law professor at Washington University.
Still, Mr. Trump said in a November tweet that he believes it is “visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.”
To that end, he and his lawyers announced a plan to put his assets into a trust and let his two adult sons run the Trump Organization.
How does that plan compare to arrangements made by previous presidents?
It is a departure from the practices of the past 40 years. “Every president in modern times has taken the strong medicine of divestiture,” Walter Shaub, head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, said in a recent speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Mr. Shaub and other ethics experts have said Mr. Trump should sell off his holdings, calling his plan to wall himself off from his businesses inadequate.
Sheri Dillon, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said the selling of his assets presented its own problems and would be subject to “criticism and scrutiny,” regardless of the price paid.
Mr. Trump recently promoted clothing company L.L. Bean on Twitter. Is that allowed?
Yes. Federal ethics regulations ban government employees from using their office “for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise,” but they don't apply to the president.
Could Mr. Trump still face repercussions for any alleged conflicts of interest?
A president can’t be criminally prosecuted for violations of the conflict-of-interest law, but private citizens could use lawsuits involving his businesses to shed light on them and any favorable treatment they might have received as a result of his ascension to power, ethics experts said. Revelations of such conflicts could damage the president politically.
Under the broad rules that govern what is known as discovery, a phase of litigation in which parties exchange evidence, a president could be forced to surrender business records or even give testimony under oath. Mr. Trump’s many contractual relationships and business competitors expose his operations to a range of potential claims, like any organization of its size.
In the 1997 case Clinton vs. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that then President Bill Clinton could be sued while in office, siding with Paula Jones in her sexual-harassment case against Mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s testimony in Ms. Jones’s case about his workplace relationships led to his impeachment for obstruction and perjury. Mr. Clinton was later acquitted in the Senate.
Much about Mr. Trump’s businesses may be under wraps now, but plaintiffs’ lawyers “are going to be able to get a whole lot of stuff, thanks to the Clinton v. Jones case,” said Mr. Painter, an ethics official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is now a professor at University of Minnesota.
Public-interest groups are likely to probe for conflicts inside the administration, using the Freedom of Information Act, a law governing the public release of government records.
Wall Street Journal

Trump aides deny planned Russian summit in Iceland - Bloomberg

Two senior aides to Donald Trump denied a report that his advisers had told U.K. officials the incoming president’s first foreign trip will be a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Reykjavik. Russian officials also derided the report.

The Sunday Times of London reported that advisers to Trump had told U.K. officials the president-elect might meet his Russian counterpart at a neutral venue such as Iceland, potentially within weeks of taking office.
The newspaper said, without providing details, that Trump planned to begin working on a deal to limit nuclear weapons. It cited an unidentified source for the summit plans, and added that Moscow is ready to agree to the meeting, based on comments from unnamed officials at the Russian embassy in London.

That embassy also knocked down the report on its Twitter feed on Sunday, and demanded an apology from the newspaper.
The Sunday Times cited an unidentified adviser to Trump that that the president-elect, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, will meet with Putin at a neutral venue “very soon.” That is “100 percent false,” a Trump aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said late Sunday.
The suggestion of a meeting in Iceland evokes the Reagan-era nuclear agreement between 
President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. The pair held a two-day summit in Reykjavik in October 1986 to work on what eventually became a major nuclear disarmament treaty between the two superpowers in 1987.

Majority people think economic & political system fail them - Fortune

Davos 2017

The Majority of People Now Believe the Economic and Political System Is Failing Them

Reuters

Updated: Jan 16, 2017 4:53 PM AEDT

Trust in governments, companies and the media plunged last year as ballots from the United States to Britain to the Philippines rocked political establishments and scandals hit business.

The majority of people now believe the economic and political system is failing them, according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, released on Monday ahead of the Jan. 17-20 World Economic Forum (WEF).

"There's a sense that the system is broken," Richard Edelman, head of the communications marketing firm that commissioned the research, told Reuters.

"The most shocking statistic of this whole study is that half the people who are high-income, college-educated and well-informed also believe the system doesn't work."

The 3,000 business, political and academic leaders meeting in the Swiss Alps this week find themselves increasingly out of step with many voters and populist leaders around the world who distrust elites.

Governments and the media are now trusted by only 41% and 43% of people respectively, with confidence in news outlets down particularly sharply after a year in which "post-truth" become the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year.

Trust in business was slightly higher, at 52%, but it too has declined amid scandals, including Volkswagen's (VLKPF, +0.71%)rigged diesel emission tests and Samsung Electronics' (SSNLF, -12.28%) fire-prone smartphones.

executives has fallen in every country surveyed, reaching a low of 18% in Japan, while the German figure was 28% and the U.S. 38%.

Trust in governments fell in 14 of the countries surveyed, with South Africa, where Davos regular President Jacob Zuma has faced persistent corruption allegations, ranked bottom with just 15% support.

As the first Chinese president to attend the WEF's annual forum in Davos, Xi Jinping may be reassured to learn that his government was ranked as the most trusted, with a 76% rating among those questioned.

The annual survey, which has been running since 2001, took the opinions of 33,000 people in 28 countries from Oct. 13 to Nov. 16 last year.

Russian hacking what we know and don't know ? - BBC News

The latest - and perhaps most headline-grabbing - source of tension between Donald Trump and the US intelligence community is an unverified report, apparently compiled by a private intelligence firm, claiming Russia has gathered compromising data about the president-elect.

Those claims raise far more questions than they answer. Here is a summary of what we know so far.

Who wrote the report and why?

It has been widely attributed to Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence officer. 

Mr Steele, who runs a London-based intelligence firm, was reportedly hired by anti-Trump Republicans to investigate Mr Trump's ties to Russia during the battle for the party's presidential nomination. In the general election campaign the research was funded by an anonymous Democratic donor.

But since Mr Steele has been in hiding since the report surfaced on Tuesday, there is no confirmation that he is the author.

What does the report say?

It consists of a series of memos dated from June to December, and said to be based on information from members of the Russian intelligence community.

It claims that Russian officials have cultivated Mr Trump for at least five years to encourage splits within the Western alliance, and shared intelligence information with him.

Most startlingly, it alleges that Russia has managed to compromise Mr Trump and is in a position to blackmail him. It says Russia's FSB agency has footage of the president-elect using prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow.

How did the public learn of the existence of the report?

CNN reported its existence on 10 January, and the Buzzfeed website published it in full.

How credible is the information it contains?

Since the report was published, Mr Trump has denounced it as "false and fictitious" and "made up, phony facts". Russian officials have also dismissed it as "pulp fiction".

All major media outlets have stressed that the report's allegations are unsubstantiated. Several, including the BBC, had knowledge of the claims before the election but were unable to verify them and therefore did not publish stories.

Newsweek says it "contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip" and points to factual errors and the misspelling of Russian names.

However, the reports were considered credible enough by the US intelligence community for a two-page summary to be given to both President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump in early January. 

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has merely said the claims were still being assessed. He also strongly denied suggestions by Mr Trump that US intelligence agencies had been involved in leaking the report.

Trump continues to make private deals despite promise to stop - Hunffington Post

Donald Trump Expanding Scottish Golf Resort After Vowing Not To Make New Foreign Deals

"No new foreign deals ... whatsoever" apparently doesn't include this one.

A multimillion-dollar expansion of Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort is proceeding despite a promise just days ago by his attorneys that “no new foreign deals will be made whatsoever” by the president-elect’s businesses, in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest during his presidency.

The Aberdeenshire Council has approved a second 18-hole golf course and more housing in the Trump International Golf Links Scotland operation. The expansion will substantially grow the complex and include a 450-room five-star hotel, timeshare complex and private housing estate, The Guardian reported Saturday. Changes are expected to significantly boost the value of the operation to the Trump Organization. 

Trump’s attorney Sheri Dillon announced at his press conference last week that in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest, her client has “ordered that all pending deals be terminated.” Trump is also arranging to turn over management of his companies to his adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, but will maintain ownership and investments in his American and global companies and real estate deals. It’s an arrangement that the head of the Office of Government Ethics said fails to meet an ethics standard met by every other president in the last four decades.

Trump owns 100 percent of the Trump International Golf Links Scotland, according to the Guardian.

A written statement later issued by Dillon’s law firm Morgan Lewis emphasized that Trump’s promise “prohibits — without exception — new foreign deals during the duration of President-elect Trump’s presidency.”

It added: “Specifically, the Trust and The Trump Organization will be prohibited at all times ... from engaging in any new deals with respect to the use of the ‘Trump’ brand or any trademark, trade name, or marketing intangibles associated with The Trump Organization or Donald J. Trump in any foreign jurisdictions.”

But now Trump’s transition team insists that the golf resort expansion doesn’t constitute a new deal.

“Implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction so we intend to proceed,” a spokeswoman told the Scottish Sunday Herald.

Richard Painter, a former White House chief ethics adviser to George W. Bush, called the situation a “perfect example” of obvious conflicts of interest that Trump will apparently continue to attempt to obfuscate.

“He’s using language which is ambiguous. It clearly illustrates that around the world, he will simply expand around the various holdings and as they continue to expand, the conflicts of interest expand,” Painter told the Guardian. “It’s like [the board game] Monopoly: if you have one house on Boardwalk, it’s not a new deal to go for three hotels on Boardwalk.”

Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf resort is particularly notable because it dramatically raised early fears about his conflicts of interest — and concerns that he would push his own business interests as president ahead of what might be best for the public. In a meeting with British politician Nigel Farage shortly after Trump’s election, Trump complained that planned offshore wind farms providing environment-protecting alternative energy would mar the views at his course. He encouraged Farage and his entourage to lobby against the farms.

Scottish residents protested against Trump when he visited last June because of how he handled the golf resort development. Neighbors are suing him because he built a fence blocking a sea view at the house of homeowners who refused to sell to him, and then sent them a bill for it.

“You watch, Mexico won’t pay either,” homeowner David Milne told the New York Times.

The Guardian has reported that Trump hasn’t paid UK taxes on his courses in Aberdeenshire and Turnberry in Ayrshire because he has lost nearly $31 million on his Scottish golf empire on an investment of some $123 million.

Huffington Post